CSS3 Buttons examples

The iPhone user controls are responsive, like tactile objects in your hand. The panels slide and the icons glow when you touch them. It gives the illusion of tighter control over the app. Switching to a touchscreen-less web browser, interactions feel stiff and unsatisfying and lack of response creates a feeling of distance been the user and the interface.
In this well described tutorial the button you will build has a distinct :hover and :active states so that it depresses when clicked. The text also bumps down 1 pixel and the text-shadow changes to give it a 2-dimensional feel. Now that CSS3 is gaining wider support, most of this styling and behavior can be done pretty easily.

Yes, it is possible to create a simple and nice (3D) layout with some CSS3 properties, only using code and without the help of any graphic editor.
You will be using box-shadow to create a drop-shadow with RGBa, border-radius and the transform property for the single items of the list to make a nice 3D effect.

Super Awesome Buttons are certainly the Daddy of all the CSS3 buttons above. It was back in April 2009 that ZURB first published this tutorial, and set a high bench-mark for all to follow.
They may look like images, but loading speed and maintainability demonstrate that they are certainly not.
It’s a simple button that is made possible by a transparent PNG overlay (for the gradient), border, border-radius, box-shadow, and text-shadow.
Yes, they are so awesome!

The CSS3 Gradient Generator was created as showcase of the power of CSS based gradients as well as a tool for developers and designers to generate a gradient in CSS.
CSS gradients generate an image result, meaning the result of a CSS gradient can be used anywhere an image can be used, be it a background-image, mask,border, or list item bullet.CSS3 Gradient Generator »

The Objective of this tutorial is to create a set of button styles that are cross browser compliant, can degrade gracefully for non CSS3 compliant browsers and are are entirely scaleable, meaning that you can make it a variety of sizes and colours with ease.
This tutorial lends its self heavily from the Super Awesome Buttons tutorial from Zurb, with some insightful and useful alterations and additions.

There was a time where creating a nice looking, scalable button required heavy use of images, the sliding doors technique and even some javascript.
As it stands a lot of the modern browsers support the CSS we would like to use to create a nice looking button. Firefox, Safari and Opera all have support for rounder corners, box shadows and text shadows.
What used to take six steps and lots of extra mark-up, images and css, now only takes three steps and some simple CSS3.

The example in this tutorial demonstrate how to create nice looking, dynamic buttons that are fully scaleable using the CSS3 properties border-radius, box-shadow and RGBa.
By using RGBa color values, the button and text shadows will always blend well with any color you choose for your button, no matter if you want the button to be green, red or blue – The code will always remain the same.

Google has a new focus on webkit-specific properties thanks to their new Chrome browser, which uses a branch of the same rendering engine Safari uses.
The buttons use the -webkit-gradient function, which takes in arguments for the gradient start and stop points as well as color and then creates what the browser basically considers an image. That means you can use gradients anywhere you would use images, including backgrounds and even borders (withborder-image).

Here you can learn how to create a cool overlapped pure CSS menu/button using CSS sprites. CSS sprites can be termed as a method for reducing the number of image requests to a web page by combining multiple images into a single image, and display the desired segment using CSS background-image and background-position properites.
The photoshop source is also available for download, so that you can customize it as per your need.

Sexy Buttons is a HTML/CSS-based framework for creating ‘sexy’ web site buttons. These stylish, attention getting buttons can be used for calls to action wherever user interaction is desired and can be used with either the <button> or <a> elements.
The entire 1000 icons from the Silk Icons set and the 450+ Silk Companion Icons set are included with the Sexy Buttons download.

Using CSS animations in Safari, you’re able to turn an otherwise ordinary button into a glowing, radioactive mess of awesome.
To make it work, you first have to specify all your button styles and then you add the shadows. Now, in the animation, you switch from a box-shadow that matches the background color to the color of the button to give it the glowing effect – And then you add in some animation. Awesome!

This is another tutorial lending itself from the perfectly titled the super awesome buttons, from Zurb. This time the developer has extended them to improve the cross browser compatibility, added a nicer design for when the buttons get clicked and finally removed the necessity to set to different background colors for different states of the buttons.

This demonstration, from Stu Nicholls of CSSPlay, will work in Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome and shows how to style buttons using just the border radius, drop shadows and gradient fills.
No graphics have been used in the demo and no extra markup. If you wanted to be adventurous you could also add a hover state change of gradient fill to give an illumination effect.

In this tutorial you will build buttons that use no images, neither in your HTML nor your CSS. There will be no sliding doors and no image replacement techniques. Just straight up, CSS, CSS3 and a bit of experimental CSS. The finished button will be compatible with pretty much any browser (though with some progressive enhancement for those who keep up with the latest browsers).

There are lots of tutorials on sliding doors button and lots on the sprite technique, but never a combination of both.This button combines the wonderful sprite technique with the sliding doors technique to make a beautiful button that not only loads in a snap but also looks great and scales to your text.

There’re plenty of tutorials that describe how to create a sexy aqua button with Photoshop, but none that will show you how to create the button using only CSS, more specifically CSS3 (-webkit-gradient, text-shadow and RGBa).

The button you’ll be creating in this tutorial takes on traditional styling using subtle gradients and outlines to give the impression of a rounded, three dimensional object. You will learn how to built this simple using CSS image sprites, starting right at the beginning in Photoshop and finishing with the complete coded example.

Using a CSS-based method means you don’t have to regenerate images every time you change text, pages will load much faster and it allows text to be easily localized. In this case it also makes the page better from an accessibility standpoint – the text contained in the <a href> can add context.
In this demo you’ll be shown a simple use for the new gradient capabilities and learn how to build a nice-looking embossed and beveled button using gradients and existing CSS properties.